


straight on 'till morning

by jumpfall



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Pre-Civil War (Marvel), Vacation, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 12:03:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11691234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jumpfall/pseuds/jumpfall
Summary: “A company jet on standby, a billionaire a phone call away, the world at your fingertips: where in the world is Pepper Potts? Well, I’ll tell you – we are in a magical, wonderful place where miracles happen.”“Don’t say Vegas.”“I was not going to say Vegas.”“Don’t say Atlantic City.”





	straight on 'till morning

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you having a bad day, week, or month: shameless, insomnia-driven Tony/Pepper fluff. Set somewhere between Avengers and IM3.

Pepper waits until the last person has filed out of her office to lock the door, kick her heels off, and put her head down on the desk. There is a fully fueled company jet thirty minutes from her door, she thinks. She can be in the air in sixty minutes and out of the country in ninety. She thinks about Swedish hot springs and Caribbean beaches and French wine, about a place without shareholders and department heads and quarterly earnings reports, where the only person she answers to is herself.

Depending on who you ask, SI is disregarding its patriotic duty or still in bed with the military-industrial complex by fulfilling DOD contracts for wearable tech and not weapons. They are either doing too much or not enough to repair the infrastructure damaged by Avenger-related incidents. She is too passive or too arrogant or too political, the sinister strategist who stole Tony’s company out from under him or the doe-eyed fling who had it dropped in her lap.

There are moments when she remembers why she said yes to this: bills they pass through congress, lifelong idols she meets, negotiations she wins, teenage girls faced with a choice between arts and science who pick both. Lately, those moments have been few and far between.

Barcelona. Berlin. Bucharest. Her Romanian is rusty, but she can say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘I’m here to post bail.’

When the urge doesn’t fade, she picks up the phone and calls Tony. JARVIS answers the phone and patches her through to the workshop, where Tony answers, “Hey, Pep, do me a favour, detour around the kitchen when you come home, there was a thing this afternoon, I’ve got it under control.”

“Say no to this,” she says. There’s a brief pause. When he comes back on the line, the background music is noticeably absent.

“Shoot.”

“Let’s go somewhere.”

“Sure,” he says immediately, and she sighs.

“Tony.”

“Ever been sky diving in Auckland? Skinny dipping in Oslo? Spelunking in Havana?”

“I said say no.” There are a hundred reasons they can’t do this. She has meetings. _He_ has meetings. Her vacation time has to be carefully planned a year in advance – there are people she has to notify, presentations she has to move, deadlines she has to meet. That is without factoring in Tony’s obligations as an Avenger.

“How did your meeting with Murray go?” he asks, and she shouldn’t be surprised he’s pulled up her work calendar, she really shouldn’t. “He still giving you a hard time about the timeline?”

“He signed off,” she says. _After thirty minutes of complaining_ , she does not. Never mind that the delay stems from a shortage of raw materials due to a storm system in South America and QA concerns about localization bugs, neither of which she can control.

“Surfing in Portugal?”

“We can’t up and leave.”

“Sure we can. Answer me this, Potts,” he says, and she closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to answer questions about her motivation or her timing or her plan; for once her in her life, she wants to jump first and think about the consequences later.

“Okay,” she responds.

“Hot or cold?” he says, and she smiles.

-

Tony is already waiting for her on the tarmac when her car pulls into the airplane hangar, reading something on his phone. In the driver’s seat, Happy is grumbling at sports radio. Tony surveys her casually over the top of his sunglasses as she approaches, pushing off the hood of the Audi. “Your go bag has three pairs of shoes,” he informs her. “And at some point, we should talk about why you have an emergency business trip but not an emergency vacation suitcase on hand.”

“How many watches are in yours?” she asks.

“Point.”

There’s a bottle of red wine waiting for them in an ice bucket on the plane. Tony pops the cork when they reach cruising altitude, just as the pressure equalizes in her ears for the last time.

“Okay,” she says, “I left Marie from technology transfer with the latest draft of the patent application for now, but there’s a call scheduled for 10am Monday morning to discuss it--”

“Marie, patent, Monday,” he says, lifting her foot onto his lap so he can pull her shoe off carefully. He leaves her foot resting on his knee as she continues.

“--Murray’s putting a call into the Coast Guard about tidal patterns off the coast of Chile --.”

“Murray, tides, Chile.” He repeats the motion with the second shoe, setting it down on the floor beside its mate.

“—and Antoine wants to prep R&D for the copyright deposition, but they don’t want to give up a work week for it.”

“More wine?” he asks, topping up her glass without waiting for an answer. “Okay, so here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “You’re turning your phone off for 24 hours, starting now. Anything your assistant can’t handle, she’s going to forward to me. JARVIS is under orders to screen calls with extreme prejudice; he discovered poorly coded Twitter AIs this week, he’s got some anger issues to work out.”

“This was a bad idea,” she says, but she doesn’t take her feet off Tony’s lap, and she doesn’t put down her wine.

“Pepper. You have six months of unused vacation time accumulated. The world is not going to end if you take a day off.”

“It might.”

“Eh, then the world has the survival instincts of a lemming. The world has it coming.” He pulls her phone out of her purse and holds it out to her in the palm of his hand, leaving the choice up to her. The notification light is blinking.

Tony looks at her, and she _knows_ that look, it is his best ‘I am a mature, responsible adult’ look, well worn in recent years after a decade spent collecting dust in the back of the closet. Tony’s got the Mark V bracelets on his wrist and JARVIS keeping them in the loop and he’s barely touched his own drink.   

Without taking the phone from Tony’s hand, she taps twice on the screen to wake it up. _New notification: 11 unread emails_ , it informs her. She hits the power button without unlocking it to check the senders, and Tony grins, sharp and devious and warm _._

“Will that be all, Mr. Stark?” she says, relaxing into her seat and burrowing her cold feet into Tony’s warm side.

“That will be all, Ms. Potts.”

-

She wakes when they touch down, the sudden deceleration jolting her to awareness. Her palm closes on the hard ridge of the arc reactor. Tony’s side is warm against hers, his left arm wrapped around her shoulders, her head resting on his chest.

“—run the numbers,” Tony says, his voice pitched low.

“Proposed modifications will yield a 5.3% increase in cooling efficiency, 12% increase in power requirements,” JARVIS responds, his voice made tinny to Pepper’s ears by the distance between her and the headset.

“Bring up a wireframe schematic –morning, Pep – highlight power usage by system, what can we pull from?”

She clears the stiffness out of her muscles with one big stretch, Tony’s sweater falling off her shoulders as she sits up straight. The cabin is dim but for the aisle lighting in the floor and the blue glow of Tony’s chest, though the light of day is beginning to peek around the edges of the window shades. She doesn’t know how long she’s been asleep, so it’s hard to say whether it’s because of a change in time zones or the length of the flight. “Been up long?” she asks.

“Only a few minutes,” Tony says, which means anywhere from five minutes to two hours. That’s not new – if he’s thinking about a project when he falls asleep, he’s got three ideas about it when he wakes up. He puts his tablet down when she leans back against him, and that _is_ new, the ability to interrupt the cycle of sleep-caffeinate-engineer in its full strength. It surprises her a little every time.

“So where are we, exactly?” she asks.

“Ah! Excellent question, honey. A company jet on standby, a billionaire a phone call away, the world at your fingertips: where in the world is Pepper Potts? Well, I’ll tell you – we are in a magical, wonderful place where miracles happen.”

“Don’t say Vegas.”

“I was not going to say Vegas.”

“Don’t say Atlantic City.”

“Colder.”

“Literally or figuratively?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he says. He leans over and reaches back behind the inclined seat to pluck a black bag from the seat behind them. Zipping open the main compartment, he extracts a round, hard shelled helmet from the bag.

He deposits the helmet in her lap. Its colors are red and gold. “Suit up, Potts.”

-

The thing people miss about Tony Stark is that he’s honest, both with himself and with the people around him. It’s not the same thing as telling the truth – you can’t lie if you don’t speak – but it’s what matters most to Pepper. She would rather have to work for the right questions than doubt their answers; Tony’s like that too, it’s half of why they work as well as they do.

Tony’s honesty is part of what makes him a good partner, but it’s all of the foundation for his competitive streak. He doesn’t throw a game, and he doesn’t like to lose.

Pepper skids through the last corner of the go-kart track, wheels locked; it’s the right angle to pop up on two wheels, but they’re going approximately twenty-five miles per hour and the momentum just isn’t there. She closes the gap between her kart and Tony’s on the straightaway, his kart under a speed penalty for attempting to take an off-course shortcut.

“Hope you don’t corner like that in the suit!” she yells as she overtakes him.

“You’re a sore winner, Potts!” he calls back.

-

“You know, you are cheesier than you look,” she says to him later, tearing a piece of pink cotton candy off a comically large ball of it.

“Hey, this date is like a classic car – it never goes out of style,” Tony says, continuing to pick off plastic bottles with a cap gun. “You tell me, who was the last guy that brought you to a carnival?”

 “Just this guy I know. Little on the short side, goatee --.”

“—sounds hot—.”

“—cheats at go-karts--.”

“—nothing in the rules about that--.”

“—blue light in his chest.”

“You know, I should meet this guy,” Tony says. “Make sure he’s good enough for you.”

“He’s the best,” she says, and means it.

-

Just before two, Tony leads them back to the car. There’s something odd about slipping into the passenger seat while Tony gets behind the wheel. He’s got more cars than any one person could ever need, but they’re all built for speed and driven for pleasure. Happy’s normally the one getting them from point A to point B. It’s a good kind of odd though, a piece of Tony-the-boyfriend she never knew when he was Tony-the-boss.

The four lane boulevard leading to and from the carnival gives way to a highway, and Tony guns it as soon as the road opens up before them, traffic light at this time of day. He’s in his element behind the wheel, confident and assured. He tailgates something awful and never does less than ten over the speed limit on the highway, but it’s an unbelievably smooth ride and that isn’t due to the car. Conversation lapses into a comfortable silence and Pepper rolls her head to one side, taking in the view. The sun on her skin is warm and welcoming, the heat mitigated by the force of the wind at this speed, the hair which has slipped out of her loose ponytail tickling her cheekbone.

Stray thoughts nip at the edges of her attention – Elizabeth from purchasing never got back to her about rescheduling their Friday meeting and the Federal Reserve will be making their decision about whether to increase the Prime interest rate next week.

“You had better not be thinking about work,” Tony says. 

“Competitor for the StarkSlumber releases today. I’m thinking about the stock price,” she responds.

“I’m thinking about nachos.”

“Their tablet sold quite well.”

“Spicy nachos. With jalapenos, and olives.”

“They picked up a 5% market share last quarter.”

“A lot of olives. Like, at least three olives.”

“That’s not very many olives for an order of nachos,” she points out.

“You are too tall for that point to go over your head,” he fires back, and she remembers the steadiness of his hand on her waist, the night before he took off for Gulmira, his fingertips resting on the edge between dress and skin, how easy it had been to lean into him on the balcony and how hard it had been to pull away.

“It’s the heels,” she says, and he laughs.

-

They stop for dinner at a brewpub along the water, the wooden patio out back overlooking the adjacent marina. Halfway through a comically large plate of nachos, Tony says, “Columbia called to ask about a commencement address.”

“I thought you were doing Caltech this year?” she asks, stealing an olive-laden chip from the top of the pile.

“Not me,” he says, amused. “You. You know, to go along with that honorary doctorate they’re giving you.”

“I didn’t think you knew about that.”

“Please, I know everything.”

“How do you keep a linen sweater from shrinking in the wash?”

“Carefully.” He pauses mid-bite, and looks up at her. “Do I own one of those?”

“No,” she says, holding up a finger to interrupt his moment of triumph. “You own ten.”

“Do _you_ own one of those?”

“No.”

“Then we’re fine.”

They stay until closing, bickering over the remains of Tony’s nachos, watching the boaters return to shore after a long day on the water. The stars are visible when they return to the car to make the drive back to the plane, and Pepper leans the passenger seat back as far as it will go, trying to pick out actual constellations amidst the fake-but-vaguely plausible ones Tony purports to see.

The steady vibration of the engine and ambient noise of cars on the road around them lull her into a sense of peace, only interrupted by Tony’s occasional commentary on the skill level of the drivers around them. The muscles in her neck relax to ease a tension she hadn’t realized was there until just now, and she’s almost sorry when they pull into the airfield.

When they’re settled in on the plane again, the engines whirring to life under their feet, Tony reaches into his pocket and extracts her phone. “It’s been 24 hours,” he says. “Fair is fair.”

Pepper looks down at it, and then over to the bag with the day’s winnings – the plastic trophy from her go kart victory, the Iron Man temporary tattoo he won at one of the booths, the souvenir mug they picked up at the brewpub. Well, she thinks. Tony was right. The world didn’t end because she took a day off.

“You know what, it’s only Saturday,” she says. “Wanna go around again?”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Viva las Vegas, baby.”


End file.
